A consignment of 11.6 tonnes of fresh peppers from Macedonia was stopped in Bulgaria after laboratory testing found the pesticide formetanate above the permitted level. The peppers entered via the Zlatarevo border crossing and were destined for an operator in Petrich. According to the Bulgarian side, they never reached shops or markets.

That is the good side of the story. The control worked before the product reached the consumer - except the control was someone else's.

The question that stays at home

If one consignment was caught at somebody else's border, what do we know about the controls on the production it came from? What about the other quantities from the same batch? And what about the food that stayed on the domestic market?

Publicly available information does not give a full answer. Oliver Milanov, director of the Food and Veterinary Agency, said the institutions have been informed, but that a decision is still pending on whether the consignment will be destroyed in Bulgaria or returned and destroyed at „Drisla”, in coordination with the State Agricultural Inspectorate.

„The operator has the right for the peppers to be destroyed, or for them to be returned and for us, together with the Agricultural Inspectorate, to destroy them at his request or at the request of the importing country”, Milanov said.

So the procedure has started, but the fate of 11.6 tonnes of peppers is still hanging.

What an exceeded level means, and what it does not

Pesticide residues in food are regulated through maximum permitted levels - the highest legally tolerated concentration when the product is applied correctly. Exceeding it means the produce does not comply with the prescribed rules.

But it does not automatically mean that anyone eating such produce will be poisoned. The European Food Safety Authority has long stressed that an exceeded legal limit is not in itself the same as a proven immediate health risk. The exact measured concentration in this consignment has not been published, so dramatising it would be speculation.

That does not make the breach insignificant. On the contrary - limits, laboratories, traceability and sales bans exist precisely for this. For the consumer it matters far more that the system stops unsuitable food reaching the table than that we argue afterwards over whether the concentration was „a little” or „a lot” above the norm.

Not the first time - and that is the point

The official European RASFF system holds a notification dated 14 August 2025 for formetanate in fresh peppers from Macedonia, reported by Croatia. The same system also holds a notification from September 2023 for formetanate residues in peppers of Macedonian origin.

That is not proof that all domestic production is a problem - such a conclusion would be unfair to the thousands who work honestly. But it is more than enough reason for the institutions to stop treating every new case as an isolated event.

So the question should not be reduced to who pays for destroying 11.6 tonnes. What matters more is whether a system exists that can move quickly from the lab result back to the field: who the producer is, which plot the goods came from, which agents were used, when the last treatment was, and whether the withdrawal period was respected.

If the answers to those five questions are not known for this consignment, they will not be known for the next one either.